While the world debates artificial intelligence, or AI, Arizona is reviving the industry that powers it.
As AI systems consume increasing amounts of computing power, the spotlight is shifting toward the semiconductor industry that makes the technology possible. In a state that helped pioneer modern chip manufacturing and is now positioning itself as a powerhouse in America’s semiconductor resurgence, a group of high school teachers gathered this summer to better understand the connection.
The occasion was the 2026 AI and Semiconductors Summer Institute, a five-day program jointly hosted by Arizona State University and Rio Salado College with support from Intel and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
The goal was to give educators a clearer view of the technologies, industries and careers that underpin AI, and a way to bring those lessons back to the classroom.
Aviral Shrivastava, a professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, who co-organized the institute, says that the idea began with an industry nudge. Intel wanted a community course because too many people still treat AI as if it exists untethered from the hardware that makes it possible.
“AI doesn’t float in the cloud,” Shrivastava says. “It runs on silicon, and if we want students to understand the future, they need to also understand the processors and chips that will power it.”
For Rick Vaughn, the faculty chair for STEM Initiatives at Rio Salado College, the institute was about making that technology stack legible. He wanted educators to leave with more than a buzzword glossary or a collection of slide decks. The objective, he says, was to show how AI, semiconductors and classroom practice are now braided together and why educators need to understand all three.
“Our goal was to connect the dots for teachers — from what a chip actually does to what the career pathways into the industry actually look like — so they could tell that story authentically to their students,” Vaughn says.
The chips behind the chatbot
The institute drew teachers from across the Valley and beyond, including educators from tribal communities and rural Arizona. Each day paired a morning discussion with an afternoon workshop, lab visit or industry immersion experience. One day focused on the AI economy and the jobs embedded in it; another dug into how machine learning systems work; another moved into deployment, where models leave the data center and show up in the real world. The week ended with a look at how silicon wafers become the chips that make the entire system hum.
That structure mattered. The educators were not being told that AI is important. They were being shown where it lives and how it works.
The most memorable moments came during the closing panel, where faculty and industry leaders spent less time selling optimism and more time trying to cut through the noise. Lisa Depew, a program director at Intel, reached for one of the cleanest metaphors of the week.
“AI is like a forklift,” Depew told attendees. “The machine doesn’t replace the worker. It changes what the worker can move, and how fast.”
Christopher Bailey, a professor of advanced semiconductor packaging in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, part of the Fulton Schools, said the changing relationship between people and AI is forcing students to rethink what learning looks like. As AI tools become increasingly capable of producing answers, he argued, students still need to understand the reasoning, judgment and problem-solving that lead to those answers.
“It’s not just the what,” Bailey said during the panel. “It’s the how.”
The distinction between output and understanding came up repeatedly during the event. The presenters repeatedly noted that the hype around AI often obscures a more practical truth. These tools can amplify productivity, but they can also reduce learning if students use them as a substitute for effort. Several speakers likened the current moment to the early days of calculators and personal computers, when schools had to decide what should be automated and what still needed to be done by hand.
Arizona’s other semiconductor investment
That tension was familiar to the teachers in the room. Adam Middleton, who teaches engineering and physics at Red Mountain High School, told KJZZ he wanted to explore how he could better help students who may not yet know what they want to do after graduation.
“I was really excited to learn more from some industry experts, from some higher education experts on what exactly the semiconductor field is like right now in Arizona and how I can use that to support our students,” Middleton said.
The institute also surfaced a question occupying many teachers’ minds: What kind of school does AI belong in? Throughout the panel discussion, educators and researchers wrestled with how teaching and assessment might evolve in a world where information is instantly accessible. The conversation kept returning to the value of critical thinking, curiosity and the ability to make sense of complex problems.
At one point during the week, one of the teachers reminded attendees to think about the California Gold Rush. History remembers the miners. The people who reliably made money, he noted, were often the ones selling the pickaxes.
If AI is today’s gold rush, Arizona is positioning itself somewhere upstream, building fabs, training engineers, investing in research and preparing the educators who will introduce the next generation of students to the field.
The chatbots may get the attention. But ASU is building the pickaxes that power the rush.
